About This Painting

This painting of bamboo growing along a riverbank is one section of
an enormous handscroll, over thirty feet long, made more than five
hundred years ago in China. Only one section of the scroll is viewed
at a time, as it is unrolled horizontally from right to left. The painter, Xia Chang (sha chung), was a member of the literati, a class of highly
educated men who were also calligraphers and artists. Xia Chang is
known primarily for his ink paintings of bamboo.

Xia used an unusual point of view for this painting—close up and very
low, as if we, the viewers, were floating on the surface of the river like
water bugs, watching the bamboo forest glide by. His elegant black
brushstrokes dance across the paper, each one unique, becoming
clusters of bamboo leaves. Blurry dots and thin, gray washes convey the softness of the mossy riverbank. He painted the angular rocks with a drier brush, giving them a rough texture. All these brushstrokes and tones contrast with the open space created by the white paper.

Bamboo represents values and qualities the literati admired in nature.
It is supple and graceful, but also tough and unbreakable. Like a pine
tree, it is an evergreen, which means it thrives in the winter. In Chinese,
the word for "node" (a bump on a branch) or "joining point" sounds
just like the word for "integrity," and bamboo has many nodes.
Paintings of bamboo require similar skills, tools, and materials as
calligraphy: brush, ink, and water. For centuries, only talented literati highly trained in calligraphy were considered worthy of making black ink paintings of bamboo.